I recently came across a book by Professor Gilly Salmon titled eModerating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online, published in the year 2000. I was just getting started as a college instructor that fall, and wouldn't dabble in online education for a few years more. Over the years I have attended my share of workshops about e-learning, online education, technology-assisted teaching, massive open online courses, micro-credentials, and whatever else was the buzzword of the day. A lot of what's in the book feels quaint at this point (teach your students that in online culture, capital letters suggest SHOUTING!). But there's a chapter toward the end that felt almost prophetic, in which the author identifies four potential futures for online teaching and learning:
1. On Planet Contentous, "content is king." Information flows from experts to novices, content-oriented online courses can have thousands of learners simultaneously (MOOCs, anyone?) and technology is just a means of knowledge transmission. Consumers choose their preferred content and their preferred experts, leading to a focus on great speakers who can captivate their audiences, entertaining content, and performance-oriented lecture delivery. TED Talks are one later outgrowth of this approach to online education; they started posting online for global consumption in 2006. Preferably the techno-savvy "sage on the stage" would have an army of researchers in the background to ensure the accuracy of their content, but sadly we've seen a dystopian version of this planet take shape in which style can outshine substance, and people are less discerning than they should be about taking the comments of online influencers at face value.
2. On Planet Instantia, learning is object-oriented, flexible, bite-sized, and always available. The motto in this version of online education is "just for me, just in time, just for now, and just enough." Teaching is fast and modular, using tools like short videos, infographics, mini applications, quizlets, and other interactive learning aids. Learners are autonomous, content is gamified and fast-paced, outcomes and competencies are tracked at a very granular level, and learners receive micro-credentials like online badges that can be displayed on their LinkedIn profile to highlight their skills. Technical experts can shine in this type of online teaching, and learners may be either excited or overwhelmed by the multitude of up-to-the-minute tools and programs used in their online course.
3. On Planet Nomadic, learning is tied to physical locations, but these aren't just the traditional ivy-covered college campuses that might serve as appealing green-screen backgrounds for content generated on Planet Contentous. Instead, Planet Nomadic taps into the Internet of Things, in which everything in the physical world is "tracked, tagged, barcoded, and mapped." Augmented-reality goggles or virtual-reality tours of the Egyptian pyramids might be consistent with Planet Nomadic's learning approach. Learning takes place on mobile devices wherever you are in the physical world, and multichannel communication is the norm -- seeing the actual world while engaging in a back-channel chat about it with fellow learners on Twitter or Microsoft Teams. Although learning can take place anywhere, it's always mediated through technology, whether in the classroom, at home, or abroad.
4. On Planet Cafélattia, there are open, peer-led, democratic communities of learning. This might include a more interactive, "guide on the side" flavor of MOOC, global learning communities, and open educational resources. Wikipedia, which wasn't launched until after the first printing of this book (January, 2001), might be the paradigmatic example of this type of online learning. Wiki-style online courses de-emphasize traditional experts, and focus more on collaboration and on the wisdom of the crowd. Some academics and proponents of liberation-style teaching are likely the most attracted to this approach. In general, this strategy sees creators retain control of their content and evolve it over time. Assessment might be based as much on peer evaluation as it is on formal credentials or competencies. Moderators and community organizers are essential people to keep this type of teaching up and running.
So where are we now, 26 years on from this book's initial publication? Certainly, all four of these online teaching styles have been tried, and all four are still in use today. I think that the flavor of online education a learner is most likely to encounter will depend in part on their level of education and the setting in which they find themselves. In K-12 education, for example, the "nomadic" model seems predominant, with devices and web-based resources pervading every aspect of classroom practice. There's a fair bit of "instantia" education in these settings as well, at least in the form of evaluation practices that track micro-skills, and gamification methods that try to make learning fun. But the K-12 approach to technology is often less modular than it could be, with everyone in a classroom working through the same online materials together -- each on their own screen and in their own online world, despite the fact that they are covering the same content while sitting together in the same physical space. The need for constant evaluation is driving this, and pushing students to be more and more online even though there's evidence that it's harming their mental health.
For a full-blown example of "planet instantia" online learning, look no further than the corporate setting. This is where on-demand learning modules have come into their fullest flower. Companies are using artificial intelligence tools to diagnose and address their employees' perceived learning needs in real-time, which is only accelerating the "instantia" model's use. For instance, my university's IT department recently launched a spam campaign against the university's own employees, with the goal of getting people to click on a message that might have been harmful if it had actually come from outside the organization. Those who failed this unannounced pop quiz immediately received a "gotcha!" email with a link to an online training module about not clicking links in spam messages, even if they seem to come from your supervisor. The training had to be completed in 30 days, and the employee's progress was duly tracked, tested, and reported to HR. Was it slick, timely, assessment-based, and focused on specific learning objectives? Yes to all of those things. Was it also confusing and frustrating as hell to the employees caught in its trap? Yes, it was, and we griped about it in the hallways for days afterwards. Did it make us all feel just a little more alienated and distrustful of our employer? Yes, that as well. This kind of "bossware" is making many employees feel even less satisfied with their jobs. Besides these drawbacks, there's also evidence that chronic interaction with technology as an additional layer on top of daily life is changing our subjective experience of life in potentially distressing ways.
Universities have largely settled on "planet contentous," although always with some pedagogy enthusiasts who proselytize for "instantia" or "cafélattia." University faculty are in fact struggling with their employers in many places over who owns their classroom content and expertise, because university bureaucracies have wised up to the fact that they could make more money from the content alone if they detached it from the experts who created it. At Arizona State University, an artificial intelligence program is scraping content from existing course modules without asking permission from the original content creators, and mashing it together into a "Frankenstein curriculum" with no specific author, which the university can potentially offer for tuition without paying its faculty. When faculty a few years ago were being encouraged to create free MOOCs as an unpaid service activity, they were similarly being asked to give away their content expertise for free (even though it certainly wasn't free for them to acquire that expertise!). Laudable goals like expanding access to education (a cafélattia-style thought about online teaching) are often cited to get faculty members to play along. But make no mistake: The university's primary business is selling expertise for money. Contentous-style online classes are a way for it to cut its labor costs while maintaining its core business model.
Within the education sector, "planet cafélattia" remains largely the venue of idealists and nonprofits -- again, Wikipedia is probably the largest-scale example of this model's success. Other social media platforms have benefitted from crowdsourced teaching and learning, and small or large communities of learners can come together easily on various sites to pursue their mutual interests. If you have ever learned how to fix something in your house by watching a YouTube video, you have benefitted from cafélattia-style online teaching. Of course, we know by now that "free" social media sites are financially supported by advertising, and even more by harvesting data on user characteristics and behaviors for sale to advertisers. This style of learning is also vulnerable to manipulation by pseudo-experts and demagogues, forces that have come together of late in our U.S. political landscape to manipulate people in ways rarely seen before. People can learn a lot online, but the ready availability of knowledge can also fool us into thinking we have a higher level of expertise than we really possess. We don't often think of social media as "education" venues, but sites like Twitter and Facebook are the single most important ways that many people get their news in 2026. It's useful to understand the roots of this type of behavior-change campaigning in the early days of educational technology.
All four of these online teaching and learning styles have had their day, and in some contexts are still having their day. Although technology has vastly diversified the ways in which people can access educational content, it has also created risks and problems that were largely unseen in the year 2000. Interestingly, my colleagues and I have seen a recent uptick in students' request for traditional lectures in teaching -- a more passive, place-based, expert-driven, and human type of teaching. "Lecture" itself is a medieval term meaning "reading" (lectio) -- the "lecturer" was the person who owned the one copy of the book, they read it to you in a drafty hall, and you scribbled down notes while they did so. So lecture isn't completely free from technology (if you consider books to be a technology), and I don't think that our students really us reading to them. But I think they are asking us to dial back on the technology, let the experts speak as experts, and increase everyone's sense of presence in the classroom.
These same students, of course, also want to have flexibility in teaching, recorded lectures for when they have competing commitments, teaching handouts distributed via a course website, and perhaps a podcast version of the lecture that they can listen to on the bus. Learning technologies are not going away. But even as we acknowledge that "the future is hybrid" in education, we need to look at the real costs imposed by the uncritical adoption or excessive use of online teaching tools, to remain aware that our online education toolbox contains more than just one solution (the list above shows that it always has), and to be more careful in selecting how, where, and why we bring technologies of all kinds into the classroom.
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